For a few years in the mid- to late-seventies, PBS aired a Saturday afternoon TV show called Once Upon a Classic. Bill Bixby hosted the anthology series, a today-forgotten actor who at the time was somewhat popular among my generation as the actor who played The Incredible Hulk’s human alter-ego, David Banner, on a CBS TV show.
(Yes, I know his name was actually Bruce Banner, but in the 1970s CBS renamed him David, which, so the story goes, the network censors demanded.)
On Classic, Bixby was a kid-show version of Alistair Cooke, introducing and unnecessarily explaining that week’s episode of some renowned literary masterpiece.
I don’t know why I started watching Once Upon a Classic, but it must have been because I felt sorry for PBS and the makers of the show, who, after all, had gone to a certain amount of trouble to learn how to operate a camera and to hire actors and to splice together a credit sequence, all for something that seemed so appallingly and nakedly educational that no kid would ever watch it.
From March 4, 1978 to May 6, 1978, Once Upon a Classic presented a serialized, ten-part adaptation of R.D. Blackmore’s ripping yarn, Lorna Doone, a tale of forbidden love between John Ridd, a humble farmer, and Lorna Doone, a noblewoman raised by an outlaw family in 17th-century Exmoor. The version I watched was directed by BBC mainstay Joan Craft, who also directed early versions of Pride and Prejudice and Jane Eyre. I could not have told you a year ago when the show began, but the date of the final episode is seared into my consciousness.
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Every Saturday, I went to Hebrew school at Beth El synagogue in Bethesda, which I hated, and then came home and watched Once Upon a Classic. It really was not the Hebrew school’s fault that I hated it, it was my own fault. I was a troublemaker, but no more so than some of the other kids there, or only a little more so.
One of my classmates that year was a young tyke named Mark Halperin, who would grow up to become a journalist and bestselling author before being felled by a really weird sex scandal.
Another classmate, my best friend back then, was Ben Goldman, who during college was a really good songwriter, and in later years was a wealthy Cisco executive. In 2008, someone murdered him in the parking lot of a Detroit strip club during a business trip.
Before all that, Ben was just a big troublemaker, but a funny one. Mark Halperin was also a funny troublemaker, but he bullied me a lot, so I don’t remember him as fondly as I remember Ben.
I’ve never really been what you’d call a planner, and if I had been, I guess I would have noticed that Lorna Doone’s tenth and final episode would air on the day of my bar mitzvah. Incidentally, that date is especially easy to remember, because twice that day, at thirty-four minutes after midnight and also thirty-four minutes past noon (in the middle of my bar mitzvah kiddush), we hit this amazing milestone: 12:34 5/6/78.
This happens only twice every hundred years, of course, and the headline on the front page of the Washington Post, on the day of my bar mitzvah, read, There’s Something to Wake Up for Today, or something like that.
Happily, or so I thought, the final episode of Lorna Doone would repeat on May 10, Thursday evening at 8 pm, on the PBS station, Channel 32, giving me an opportunity to watch it after all. Unfortunately, that conflicted with the final episode of Anna Karenina on Masterpiece Theatre on the PBS station Channel 26, which my parents intended to watch. While Anna Karenina would also be repeated on Sunday evening, May 13, which presented no conflict, my parents didn’t intend to wait, and they would not listen to reason.
I begged, I pleaded, I bargained. Their decision was arbitrary and unfair. My parents shrugged. It would ruin my bar mitzvah, I said. They didn’t care. I was SOL.
Back then, we had just one TV in our household, a big oval screen monstrosity from the early 1960s that sat on four legs in the middle of our living room. Maybe VCRs had been invented, but we didn’t have one. There was no streaming video, of course. Once a TV show aired, that was that. So I had faithfully watched nine episodes of Lorna Doone, and when the tenth and final one aired, I couldn’t watch it, because of my parents’ unreasonableness, and that was the end of that, as far as I knew at the time. Of course, I could read the book, but it would not be the same.
This kind of gnawed at me over the next nearly-fifty years! It was both the incompleteness of it, having been denied the joy of watching the final episode of a serialized show that I loved and watched religiously, as well as the kind-of arbitrary unfairness of my parents’ behavior. There was zero reason for them to deny me this pleasure. The fact that they denied me this pleasure on the occasion of my bar mitzvah made the whole thing especially appalling. When I remember my bar mitzvah, I remember this.
Once the internet came about, I knew that the TV show was out there somewhere, on video in an incompatible format. It was not a fait accompli that the show would even still exist in any format. British television has been much less scrupulous about television preservation than we Americans have, and many gems have been lost. Indeed, Craft’s own adaptation of Anne of Green Gables from 1972, which starred Kim Braden (Picard’s wife on Star Trek: The Next Generation) is now lost, so it is lucky that her Lorna Doone, filmed a mere four years later, has survived.
.
Finally, last year, I could take it no longer. I ordered the DVD of the show from a company called “Acorn Media” and also purchased an “all regions” DVD player from a company called IeGeek.
Forty-six years had passed, and my memory of the show, and of any cliffhanger from Episode 9, had dulled significantly. I remembered only that it was compelling and exciting, in addition to being obscure and unknown to anyone but me.
So once the DVD and the DVD player arrived, I watched it from the beginning. It has all the clunkiness that one remembers from the 1970s BBC shows, like randomly and apathetically choreographed and filmed action scenes and – especially – the extremely odd tradition of using film for outdoor scenes and video for indoor scenes, which almost no one anywhere in the world has ever done, other than the BBC in the 1970s.
None of that would have bothered me nearly fifty years ago. I would have expected it. The weird look of the show was what PBS shows looked like back then, and as for action, in the pre-Jackie Chan era, I just didn’t expect people on TV to look as though they were really fighting.
And I can see why I loved the show. The stars are appealing in a way that plays to a 12-year-old. John Sommerville, as the upstanding farmer John Ridd, perfectly embodies the character’s mix of awkwardness, self-doubt and superhuman invincibility as described in the novel. Emily Richard, as Lorna, the unexpectedly good-hearted child of a wildly lawless and wealthy family that has terrorized the countryside for years, doesn’t play up the romantic flightiness and perplexing quirks of Blackmore’s creation — the actress is much too old to pull such a thing off convincingly — but her performance is dignified and sympathetic in just the way that a 12-year-old would appreciate. And Tom Faggus (Ian Hogg), the family’s highwayman cousin, a crook with a heart of gold, must have been very amusing to my pre-teen self.
But what I think was really the key to this show’s appeal, for me, anyway, was the slice-of-life nature of the story, the immersive nature of the setting and the lifestyle, which seems so genuinely and believably depicted in this show, despite the artificiality of the era’s technology. The TV script, in fact, pares down the episodic nature of the main story, which is an improvement. In the original book, the story itself sometimes seems to get in the way of the narrative’s true pleasures.
In the years that followed, Emily Richard was fairly active in British television, although in small roles, and her credit list comes to a halt in 1997. John Sommerville has had a couple of very minor parts in a very small number of productions. John Ridd was the perfect role for him, and it is a shame that his performance is so unknown.
Still, it was an amazing experience for me to revisit this great and enchanting show, and finally, all these years later, to see how it all ends. I recommend it; even better, watch it with a kid.
^^^
Steven S. Drachman, who penned this review, writes regularly for Oblivioni. His reviews and feature articles have been featured in The New York Times, The Washington Post, Entertainment Weekly and many other places.
Image design by Kalyee Srithnam, based on original photographs from the 1976 TV series.